About 98,000 Samsung mobile handsets in need of software updates that will allow them to make emergency calls reliably are still connecting to Australian networks, the device maker has revealed.
Samsung yesterday told the parliamentary inquiry into the September Optus triple zero outage that 1.6 million devices had successfully been updated, but that its investigations had found that a further 98,000 remained “alive and active”.
Samsung Australia’s mobile division Eric Chou told the inquiry that the phones can still make emergency calls on Optus and Telstra networks.
However, he confirmed that they have a firmware configuration that only allow them to use TPG Telecom’s shuttered Vodafone-branded network to place emergency calls.
“Telstra and Optus ‘[networks] as of today can actually still take emergency calls on those devices [without the software update]. It’s only in incidents where there is no Telstra coverage, no Optus coverage, where those [not updated] devices would need to rely on the Vodafone 3G network which no longer exists,” Chou said.
Australian carriers shutdown their 3G networks in early 2024.
That means that if any one in distress tries to use one of the 98,000 unpatched handsets to place an emergency call when Telstra and Optus’ mobile networks are not available, the call will not reach triple zero operators.
Samsung handset models known to have the firmware issue have reportedly already been linked to two fatalities in which problems reaching first responders via triple zero played a part.
Of the 98,000 unpatched devices, 60,000 are active on Telstra’s network, 28,000 on Optus’ and 10,000 on TPG, Samsung said.
Roughly 1.6 million effected devices have already received the necessary software updates to make them capable of placing eVoLTE (Voice over LTE) triple zero calls of TPG Telecom’s Vodafone-branded 4G network, Chou said.
As iTnews reported, Telstra was first to bell the cat about the issue, announcing on its blog that in October that it had discovered 71 Samsung handset models with the problem.
The 98,000 devices that Samsung identified can be updated.
An additional 11 handset models were identified as being incompatible with upgrades and are now blocked from network access, Chou said.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority warned in early December 2025 that potentially hundreds of thousands of Australians could be at risk of not being able to reliably call emergency services.
TPG Telecom reported In November that a customer in Sydney’s west died in circumstances involving emergency calling and use of a Samsung mobile handset model known to have the firmware limitation.
TPG Telecom’s chief executive Iñaki Berroeta shocked the triple zero committee hearing yesterday when he used his opening statement to reveal yet another possible fatality involving emergency calling and another Samsung handset known to have the problem.
He told the committee that Telstra had only made him aware of second incident, which took place September 24, before the first reported incident in November.
Berroeta, however, told the committee that the carrier was still gathering details from authorities, including Ambulance Australia, to confirm Telstra’s version of events.